Policies in the News

Blog #20

Take a look at your local news or listen to the news on the radio or TV over the next week and see if you can identify policies that will affect environmental quality. Can you see a direct or indirect relationship to human health?

I probably caught about 3-4 days of news this past week and saw nothing about environmental quality; but received an alert from Monterey County Weekly on an update from last month. Groundwater Sustainability Agency board has voted to approve new water fees. The article states that although California has seen more then its far share of rain, there is still a looming crisis with water. In February the board voted to approve a new fee structure pending minor revisions that were up to a second vote last month. Under this fee structure they have two sections: Agriculture and all others. Agriculture users will be assessed $4.79 and all other will be assessed $2.26 per service connection. This new fee schedule is a part of Californias effort to regulate groundwater, which has historically been in Monterey "pump as you please", and does not have the same restrictions as surface water.
I'll have to follow the events this month to see officials plan to assess land, who uses what and what the final schedule will be.

Do you know that name of your local elected officials- local, state, and national?

Are there health policies that you typically track by yourself or through your professional nursing organization or nursing union? How might you get more involved in promoting environmental health policies?

Last year I attended Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Congress, the training act that I was most interested in was The Palliative Care and Hospice Training Act; the presented information on PCHETA which provides education and training opportunities in palliative care to nurses and other healthcare providers to establish a national campaign to inform patients, families and health care professionals about the benefits of palliative care. They also presented that NIH would expand research programs to improve the delivery of palliative care to patients.
The newest policy to come from this is Information Act, simply requiring physicians to offer information about palliative care to those newly diagnosed with a terminal illness and require facilities to adopt policies and procedures to provide patients with information about palliative care and to facilitate access to it. And most recently in one of our modules the state of Massachusetts was working to pass laws that require licensed hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and assisted living facilities to identify patients and residents who could benefit from palliative care and disseminate information regarding its availability. I found an update to this and a pamphlet they have made available:

Because Patients